My Little Datacenter
From painting the wall to deploying servers, I have designed and setup my own little datacenter to host all of my server hardware and storage equipment. This is the annual milestone of 2022. Every detail of the room, including electricity, ventilation & air conditioning, fiber network, access security, windows & walls, and server rack capacity, are all designed and mostly deployed by myself.
Bioinformatics Research
I have deeply participated in a genetic research project since 2020. I am responsible for filtering and downloading data, designing & deploying servers, configuring network & equipment, maintaining databases, and developing the full pipeline scripts to automate the entire process. I take care of all CS-related stuff, so the others could focus on their biology theories.
Global Access Points
My little data center is in one location, yet the visitors are from around the world(including myself). This creates demands for high-quality networks. To ensure a smooth experience for most of the visitors, satellite nodes were deployed across the world as network proxies. Those nodes have an optimized network connection with the data center. All traffic is first sent to one of the access points and then pass to different backends.
Hybrid Storage
Each application or even website sits in its own VM. Linux systems tend to be small, but the application data it hosts could be large and changing. A hybrid storage model was adopted where only the system disk is provisioned on the hypervisor's SSD array. All other storage is done through network drives mounted with one of the storage nodes, and the capacity can be adjusted dynamically.
Self-Managed CA
Security is always a priority. TLS certificates are needed for most of the internal or management connections. However, it is neither practical nor affordable to purchase certificates from external CAs. A self-signed root CA was then adopted. Just like any well-known CAs, it signs multiple intermediate CAs to issue different certificates and was isolated in a secure location.
Minecraft Servers
Starting in junior high school, I've been hosting Minecraft servers for more than 10 years. I created a Bungeecord group consisting of multiple servers, including proxy, lobby, survival, creative and sub-game servers. Each has different configurations and even game versions. Hosted all on my own server hardware with BGP optimized network. Open-sourced management software was configured to provide web control.
